Be Like That
by Leannan Sidhe
Summary: Inspired by the song Be Like That by 3 Doors Down. Ron has recently noticed that Harry and Hermione are acting strange, wanting something they think they can't have. Can Ron help them?


Be Like That

_He spends his nights in California_ _  
Watching the stars on the big screen.  
Then he lies awake and wonders  
Why can't that be me?  
Cause in his life he's filled with all these good intentions.  
He's left a lot of things he'd rather not mention right now.  
But just before he says goodnight,  
He looks up with a little smile at me and he says _

If I could be like that  
I'd give anything  
Just to live one day  
In those shoes.  
If I could be like that, what would I do?  
What would I do?

Now and dreams we run.

She spends her days up in the north park,  
watching the people as they pass.  
And all she wants is just a little piece of this dream, is that too much to ask?  
With a safe home, and a warm bed, on a quiet little street.  
All she wants is just that something to hold onto, that's all she needs.  
Yeah!

If I could be like that, I would give anything  
Just to live one day, in those shoes.  
If I could be like that, what would I do?  
What would I do?

I'm falling into this, in dreams we run away.

If I could be like that, I would give anything  
Just to live one day, in those shoes.  
If I could be like that, what would I do?  
What would I do?

If I could be like that, I would give anything  
Just to live one day, in those shoes.  
If I could be like that, what would I do?  
What would I do?

If I could be like that, I would give anything  
Just to live one day, in those shoes.  
If I could be like that, what would I do?  
What would I do?

Falling in.  
I feel I am falling in to this again

I looked at Harry as he sighed for the tenth time that night. He was staring intently at the T.V. as an ordinary looking show about normal people played. I personally could not see what he found so fascinating about the show, it was incredibly boring. I could look out the window and see people walking past whose lives fit the plotline the show sported. It was about some person's unspectacular life living in California. They didn't even live in L.A., which was, in my opinion, the interesting part of California from what I had heard from Harry and Hermione.

We were currently staying in a muggle hotel. All day we had been traveling to different sights, trying to find people who hadn't been seen in about ten years. They were rumored to have information about the horcruxes we were looking for, or at least clues on where they might be. I wasn't sure how we were going to find them when Dumbledore wasn't able to, but Hermione said something about how they might not be as intimidated by us and so become careless at covering up their tracks. Thus we found ourselves on a wild goose chase, which was incredibly boring so far. We spent days upon days looking up the last places these people had been seen in, trying to get some kind of lead on where they might have run off to.

The highlight was the different places we spent the night in. These television things were fascinating. The muggles sure knew what they were doing when it came to entertaining people. We once watched a spy movie, and I couldn't help but relate it to what we were currently doing, tracking down leads, trying to find the "bad guys." Except the people we were looking for weren't necessarily bad guys. They just had valuable information about Voldemort that we needed, and were, understandably, afraid for their lives should we happen to find them.

I look again to Harry, who was completely captivated by what was going on in the show we were watching. We had spent the last couple nights watching this particular show, which I still couldn't find anything special about. It was like Harry was trying to live this person's life; trying to live in California, night after night.

Each night, when the T.V. was silent and we were getting ready for bed, Harry would become silent, depressed. Whenever I asked him what was wrong, he would look at me for a few seconds, as if evaluating if I was worthy enough to know, and then tell me that he was fine. I hated that. Was I not trustworthy enough to be privy to Harry Potter's true feelings? I, Ronald Weasley, his best friend since first year, was not enough to ask for the knowledge of how Harry Potter feels at a given moment. I hated the feeling of inadequacy I got whenever Harry lied to me. I had been by his side, with only a few exceptions, for the whole of my Hogwarts career, going on the seventh year now. I got tired of being lied to, so I stopped asking.

There was an empty space that existed between us, filled with topics to be avoided, Harry's lies, and my own anger. Everyday it grew, every unasked question, every incident of avoiding the truth, every half-suppressed glare. I sometimes wondered whether the friendship between Harry and I will ever be as it was first year, and I despaired that I could never recover that innocent trust.

I understand now that I would never want Harry's life; my jealousy was finally put to rest. I know of, and have seen many of the things that plague his nightmares and I have to say that I am glad that I do not shoulder the burden that he does. To have a Dark Lord after me for most of my life, to see the horrors that he has to face, would have destroyed a lesser man, one such as me. I know now that Harry is the best person for the job, even as I hate that fact because of the emotional effect it has had on him.

Everything that Harry has done has been out of the goodness of his heart. He always tries to do what is right, to help people, and I admire that. But a lot of people do not understand what kinds of decisions he faces, what situations he finds himself in, and they blame him for making mistakes, for being human. There are a lot of things that have happened in Harry's life that he has not told me about, and deep down I respect that, even as I hate the lack of trust it implies. I know that there are parts of Harry's life that he doesn't want people to know about, things that he is ashamed of. I just wish he knew that I would never think any less of him, not now. Maybe someday he will be able to tell me all the things he cannot mention currently.

The silence of the room shocked me out of my gloomy thoughts. I looked up to see Harry with the thing for working the T.V. in his hand, a re-something. He had turned off the television, which was the typical signal that it was time to get ready for bed. I picked up my pajamas and toothbrush and headed into the bathroom, knowing without having to look that Harry's expression was saddening and his eyes were slowly going blank. It was the same night after night.

I came out from the bathroom five minutes later, ready for bed. Harry passed me in his pursuit of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand and pajamas already on his body. I threw a regretful look at the closed bathroom door, sorry for the lost trust between us, before peeling back the covers on my bed and climbing in. We had a two bed hotel room and Hermione was in the room connected to ours. She wanted her own room, her own privacy. Harry and I figured she read her books in there and didn't want us with her to distract her. Sometimes it was unavoidable that we would share a room because the hotel didn't have two rooms close together. There was no way we wanted to be too far apart; too easy to attack us without the others knowing. When we had to share a room, I typically slept on the couch. Those nights weren't so enjoyable.

The bathroom door opened and Harry came out. He had a different expression on his face than when he had gone into the bathroom, not as depressing. I shot him a curious look when I noticed this because he typically got more depressed as the night went on. I watched him as he started peeling the covers back and, figuring that I wouldn't get a response to the curious look, not that I was expecting one anyway, I said "Goodnight."

Harry glanced up at my voice and gave me a half-smile. I was understandably startled. I hadn't seen any type of genuine smile on Harry's face since before Dumbledore died. I was curious as to what was happening with the Harry that I had been living with for the last two months. It was as if he had finally decided to come out of his shell.

Harry looked to me, the half-smile still on his face, and then gestured to the T.V. "If I could be like that I would give anything; just to live one day in those shoes." He paused here to look out the window, and almost wistfully said: "If I could be like that, what would I do?" He shook his head and said almost too quietly for me to hear "Now and dreams we run," before getting into bed and falling asleep.

I hate to say that I didn't fully understand the meaning behind Harry's words immediately. I didn't even know that night, though I remained awake, pondering over them hours after Harry had succumbed to sleep. It actually took me two days to figure out what Harry was telling me, two days of being distracted and generally a bother to our search. This, of course, hindered the search and we lost the trail of the guy we were trying to find. I was the key person in this part of our hunt for clues as I was the strategist. Hermione figured out whom to find, I found the person, Harry got the information, and Hermione figured out what it meant. This caused Harry and Hermione to become annoyed with me of course, but there was nothing I could do about that. To me, Harry was far more important than some guy we could probably find again later and I needed to find out what was bothering my friend so much that he was slowly losing himself in despair.

Those two days were not only spent pondering the situation with Harry, but also watching Hermione. My preoccupation with observing Harry for the last two months did not stop me from noticing Hermione's changes. I did notice them, but decided that Harry's problems were a priority as he was my first friend at Hogwarts and the key person to defeating Voldemort, that scaly bastard who has caused the first declared civil war amongst wizard-kind since the time of the founders. Dumbledore's fight with Grindlewald had the potential to escalate to the scale that the fight with Voldemort has now reached, but it ended far too soon for the ministry to get off its lazy asses and consent to a war.

It is sad that these factors would cause me to dismiss Hermione's problems for the moment, but such were the circumstances in which we lived. I had to be strong, for our group and for the survival of the wizard and muggle worlds. I knew that the two around me were giving in to the pressure placed on their shoulders, giving in to the hopelessness of our task. I mean, if Dumbledore could not figure out where all the horcruxes were, then how were we supposed to? Us, mere teenagers, were supposed to save the world. It sounds crazy, but it was true. So you see why I had to stay strong. The entire world was relying on us, and if we failed then we doom the world to an existence of death and pain. Thus my initially dismissal of Hermione; it is not that I care for her any less, but as a strategist, I knew Harry was more important. This was how we lived and this was how we would live until that bastard was dead.

Anyway, those two days I spent pondering Harry's words and discreetly observing Hermione when I could. It was difficult observing her all the time because of the slight issue of being opposite genders. Do you think I could remain inconspicuous strolling into the girls restroom after Hermione? I didn't think so.

Both of days, after we, okay I, had lost the trail of our prey, Hermione managed to convince Harry and me to spend some time in the park on the north side of London. We had come here often in the past couple of weeks; Hermione claimed that being surrounded by nature helped her study or think up new ideas. I wasn't too sure about this claim as she spent a lot of time watching the people who came to the park instead of reading the book in her lap, but I allowed her to keep her pretenses. The second day was when I finally put all the puzzle pieces together and figured out what both Harry and Hermione were longing for.

I spent the two days at the park lying on the grass, relaxing in the sun, and observing Hermione in between bouts of berating myself for losing our suspect and pondering the meaning behind Harry's words the other night. As I continued scrutinizing Hermione, I noticed a pattern appear in the people she watched at the park. It was never the depressed people, always families with young children running around and laughing, parents smiling as they watched their kids, and everyone wearing bright clothing. She watched them with such a wistful look that I was surprised I had not noticed this earlier, even with Harry being my top concern. She was so obvious. But this alone was not what caused me to figure out my self-appointed puzzle, no the next clue came on the second day.

We were in the park again, me on the grass, Harry by the pond, and Hermione on the bench, books and notebooks sitting beside her. Harry was staring idly into the reflective waters, most likely contemplating whatever had been on his mind lately rather than enjoying the rippling of the water as it reacted to the gentle breeze. I was staring at the sky, supposedly deep in thought about where our latest suspect had disappeared to, but instead watching Hermione out of the corner of my eye. Hermione was alternating staring at the people around her, wistful look etched onto her face, and idly writing in the notebook clutched in her hands. It was obvious we had hit a stalemate in our search for the horcruxes; a stalemate brought about by the lack of motivation in my two companions. I knew that if we worked together, we could end this war, we could defeat Voldemort, but when most of our group was dwindling away into a melancholy state, any hope for a bright future diminished along with them.

After an undeterminable amount of time, Hermione apparently grew sick of sitting around, envying the families around her, and getting no work done. She decided she needed a break and mentioned that she was getting a drink before walking toward one of the vendors set up on the outskirts of the park. I raised my hand and gave a flippant wave to acknowledge that I'd heard her while Harry merely continued gazing into the pond's watery depths. After making sure that Harry really was completely absorbed in his thoughts as it had seemed he was, I sat up and looked at the bench Hermione had been sitting on. She had left the notebook she had been writing in earlier.

Now, propriety demands that as Hermione's good, trusted friend, I should not invade her privacy in ways like reading her personal notebooks, but as I had said before, war changes things. I had to get to the bottom of the troubles my friends, my fellow fighters, were having in order for us to succeed in our mission. Therefore, I had no choice but to casually walk over to the bench and pick up Hermione's notebook, flip to the pages she had been writing on, and read. This is what ultimately led me to figure out what was ailing my two companions.

When I first opened the book, I was surprised to discover the absence of Hermione's neat handwriting filling up countless pages. Instead, random doodles and scrawled words filled each page, disorganized and chaotic. Clearly whatever was ailing Hermione was affecting her more than I had previously thought; she never allowed such mess to invade any of her personal belongings. My curiosity growing, I quickly flipped through the pages until I found the one she had been writing in earlier. There, plain as day, was the answer to all my ponderings. The page was filled with doodles of people, adults and children, all with big smiles on their faces. Words such as "safe," "home," "quiet," and "family," filled the margins. And on the bottom of the page was a coherent thought, sentence, an admission to what Hermione truly wanted. It bore a strange resemblance to the words Harry had spoken the other day, but when added to all the other clues I had managed to collect, it all made sense. She had written:

"If I could be like that, I would give anything, just to live one day in those shoes. If I could be like that, what would I do? What would I do? I'm falling into this, in dreams we run away."

It was so simple. They wanted a normal life, a life without danger, an ordinary life, a boring life; a life without Voldemort. They despaired that such a life would ever happen to them, their hope that we would win was fading. I noticed it in Harry first because he had never had a normal life, he didn't know what to look for, and looked to shows on the T.V. for help. Hermione knew what such a life entailed, having lived it before she was accepted to Hogwarts. Thus it was harder to notice in her behavior, because her visions were inside her, already memories. She didn't have to look at the T.V. just to catch a vision of what seems like the perfect reality when living with the ravages of war. My friends were falling apart in their yearning to be someone else, someone people did not place their hopes for the future in. I had to do something, to pull them back from their fantasies and into reality. It was cruel, I know, to deprive them of their dreams, but in order to make those dreams real, we had to finish what we came here to do.

During the time it took me to reach these conclusions, Hermione had finished taking her break and was walking back toward the bench to resume her daydreaming. I quickly placed her notebook back on the bench and resumed my spot on the grass, staring at the sky. I no longer had to observe either Harry or Hermione and so I took this time to figure out what I would say to them later, because I knew that we had to talk, that I had to address this issue before it was too late to pull them back from the land of dreams.

We stayed out in that park until the last rays of sunlight gave way to the soft hues of moonlight. Then, since we no longer had an excuse to stay as the moon did not provide enough light to research by and all of the people had left the park to return to their houses, we decided to trek back to our hotel. We had moved from the one we had been staying in two days earlier and were now forced to stay in one room as the new hotel was relatively full. I wasn't complaining, though, even though I knew I would have to sleep on the pull-out bed, or a cot, whichever was available. This arrangement made it easier for me to force both Harry and Hermione to participate in the talk that was imminent; they did not have a separate room to escape to.

We eventually walked into our room, after using that piece of plastic to open the door. I watched as both Harry and Hermione walked over to their claimed beds, sat on them, and reached toward that re-thing to turn the T.V. on. Deciding it was now or never, I grabbed the re-thing before they could and gazed at them seriously as they realized that I was not intending to turn on the T.V. "We need to talk," I began, and was rewarded with fleeting glances of apprehension.

"For the past couple of weeks I have noticed that something has been bothering both of you. I had no idea what it was at the time, but knew that it was hampering our mission. Since then, I have come to a conclusion of what has distracted both of you. You both want normal lives; you want to live freely, without the threat of Voldemort's shadow trailing our every action. You're obsessing over this, this want for normalcy. Don't you see it? Both of you are losing yourself in dreams, losing touch with reality. If you keep up with this, your dreams will _never_ become reality. Voldemort will win. The world as we know it will cease to exist. I need you two to come back, to work just a little bit longer, to find the drive that has carried us through six years of danger. The world needs you, I need you. I can't do this alone, and we're the only ones who have a chance to succeed."

I stopped talking to access how Harry and Hermione were taking my lecture. This would tell me what extremes I may have resort to in order to pull them back from their self-imposed exile from reality. Losing them to dreams was not an option. I was pleasantly surprised to see them both intently listening, hanging on my every word. Their eyes indicated that just having me understand their plight, their dreams, was helping. It gave them an anchor, someone who understood who was part of reality and not part of a dream world. By understanding I was pulling them back. It was amazing that the solution should be so simple when it took me so long to figure out the problem.

"Harry, there is only one thing standing in the way of your dream of normality, and that is Voldemort. Kill the bastard and you're free. You're free to disappear into obscurity. You can leave the Wizarding World and start over as someone else, someone who doesn't stand out. Hermione and I will help you with this, but you need to kill Voldemort first. You are the only one who can. Do this, and the Wizarding World will have no hold over you, they will owe you so much for saving them that they can never force you to do anything again. All you will have to do for freedom is create a new identity, a new appearance, which both Hermione and I can do for you. That's it. Just put in that much more effort to rid to world of evil and you're done. And you won't be doing it alone, Hermione and I will help you. Just a little longer, Harry, and then you will no longer have to merely dream about freedom, about normalcy."

There were tears glistening in Harry's eyes. With my words, I had brought hope back into his life, hope that he would finally have what he has been longing for his entire life. I could see that he was convinced, that he would put in the extra effort. The Harry I had been friends with for six long years was back. No longer was he lost within his mind. I turned to Hermione, knowing that it was merely a matter of time before our team was back together and more determined than ever to bring down Voldemort.

"Hermione, I know that you long to settle down, buy a house, and have a family. I want that too. But as long as Voldemort is around, we will never have that. We will never be able to walk down the street without glancing over our shoulder, or enjoy a relaxing day of shopping in Diagon Alley." I paused to organize my thoughts and gather my courage. There was a topic we had avoided ever since we had started this mission at the end of sixth year, and I was about to bring it up. Before continuing, I reached out and grabbed her hand, holding it within mine, gently caressing her knuckles. Startled, her eyes sought out mine, seeking an explanation. "I want to grow old with you. I want to have children, but to do that while Voldemort is still a danger to our world is cruel and unfair. I want to buy a house with you, to hear you nagging me about my eating habits everyday, to wake up in the morning and know that today will be a good day because you are mine. I know we haven't discussed our relationship since the end of school as we figured it was better to focus our attention on stopping Voldemort, but I want you to know that I never stopped thinking about you. I promise you that once Voldemort is dead, you can settle down, go shopping, take a stroll around the park, and have a family. I'd like to be a part of that family, if you'll let me, but first we have get rid of the evil that is threatens our world."

Hermione's eyes were streaming tears now, but she looked happy so I wasn't worried. When I finished talking, she let out a strangled sounding "Ron" and launched herself at me. I pulled her into a hug and savored that feeling for a few seconds before I reached my hand out to Harry to include him in the hug too. He came willingly, and we stood there, holding each other, for a long time. My friends were back.

We didn't watch T.V. that night.

_If I could be like that, I would give anything_

* * *

This is my first story on this penname and my first story based off of a song. If this is against the guidelines that have, please inform me and I shall take it down. I didn't know if this qualified as I didn't use the song as anything other than inspiration. Hope you all enjoyed it. If any of you have any ideas for more songs to turn into Harry Potter stories and you don't want to write them yourselves, let me know and I shall endeavor to write them. Thanks! 

MM

PS. The song is obviously not mine, it is by 3 Door Down.


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